Meet Grace

 Hi all -

Sorry for the long delay since my last post. August ended up being a busy month. With Lance's passing, I was finally able to go to Kansas City to visit the family. It had been a year and a half since my last visit, so this was a long time coming! I had a great time with my family! We went to the "Barbie" movie, got massages and pedicures, and spent some quality time together. My hairdresser is in KC, so I finally got to get my hair cut. It feels so much better being short again!! And I helped my sister start to go through all of the stuff that has accumulated in her house over the years. We made some great progress and she felt so good about what we did! Then, the day after I got back home, I went to the Humane Society and adopted a new dog. Meet Grace:

Grace in the pool at the shelter

Grace in her bed at home with some of her many toys

Grace hunting squirrels in her new backyard

Grace is a 10-month old puppy of mixed breed. I'm not sure what breeds exactly, but people have guessed she might be part Rottweiler, part Akita and part Shepard. She has her first vet visit tomorrow so I'll see what he thinks she might be. She's a very sweet, well-behaved little girl and she gets along with the cats great! She's taking up most of my time right now.

Other than that, I've continued to make crochet of the Lion Brand market bags that I like so well. I've been making them in a variety of colors, concentrating on colors that might be more appealing to men:

These are all made with Bamboo Pop yarn, which is a 50% cotton, 50% rayon from bamboo yarn. It makes a really soft yet strong bag. I really like how these turn out. These will all be Christmas presents for members of my family.

I've also been getting ready for Joji Locatelli's Fall Knit-Along (KAL). I've never dong this KAL before, but I think it's going to be fun. It runs Sept-Nov. You have to sign up ahead of time with which of Joji's patterns you might make. It's okay if you don't end up making the patterns that you sign up for, but you can only work on those patterns for the KAL. There are a bunch of prizes and people join in from all over the world. (Joji is from Argentina.) It sounds like a really fun and supportive group! So I've been spending some time looking through Joji's patterns and deciding what I might make. I've picked out several shawl and cowl patterns as gifts for the women in my family and some hats for the men. I picked out yarn for a bunch of the projects and wound some of the yarn into cakes so I'm ready to start with my first project on Sept 1 (you can't start before then). I signed up for more projects than I think I'll be able to finish so I'll have options depending on what I feel like working on. It will be nice if I can get all of my gifts finished!

That's all that's happening on my end. I hope everyone is doing well!

Nancy